Situational crime prevention and Public Safety Canada’s crime-prevention programme

This study examines the work undertaken by Canada’s National Crime Prevention Centre (NCPC) under the auspices of the Public Safety Canada. NCPC operates with a social development approach to preventing crime, focussing largely on small pilot projects that work with at-risk youth. We suggest that this is a rather narrow definition of crime prevention and that it may not necessarily be an optimal strategy for all crime preventions in Canada. In particular, many international crime and safety organizations suggest the need for integrated approaches in crime prevention. In addition, there is an array of evidence-based situational crime prevention (SCP) strategies from which Canada might benefit. SCP has a history of success in designing out a wide range of crimes from credit card fraud to car theft and burglary. It is proposed that, at minimum, a more inclusive crime-prevention programme that incorporates SCP would produce a significant net benefit to the safety of Canadians

Crime prevention in Australia - beyond ' what works?'

Recent decades have seen governments around Australia launch crime prevention policies to much fanfare. Often, however, achievements have fallen well short of expectations. A key problem is that too many attempts to develop and implement crime prevention have not thought through and articulated what relevant strategies might signify and hope to achieve. In the absence of a basic understanding of, and agreement about, the overall enterprise in which central and local players are engaged, program sustainability and drift problems prevail. Attempts to overcome these difficulties simply by maintaining that polices must be based on "what works?" principles are not helpful. This paper works through the implications of the above observations for the way crime prevention strategies should be designed and administered. It argues that commitment to flexible problem identification and solving in the context of a clearly articulated crime prevention planning process is critical to success. However for crime prevention to emerge and be sustained, governments must see it as consisting of a dialogue between central and local levels. This will only be achieved if strategies developed by the centre are informed by, and reaffirm, a clear political vision and sense of mission